De offers some marvelous advice around her current project/assignment: writing short radio mystery scripts. Much of it sounds applicable to a lot of writing projects.

First, write down a one- or two-sentence description of your story--the mystery rather than the solution--as if you were writing the hook for a book-of-the-month club. Come up with a catchy title.

Then write down the names of the characters, drawing lines between the characters indicating their relationships. Each character has to have connections to at least two other characters. Come up with 6-9 characters. You don't have to use them all, but stretching the number of characters will help you stretch the possible relationships.

Decide what the solution to the mystery is. Because the characters are so intertwined, it should be easy to drum up a few red herrings.

Write a 1- to 2-sentence description of each character. Focus on relationships and conflicts, but include at least one trait: gentle, boisterous, mutters.

Give yourself 10 scenes. The first three scenes are the beginning; the situation must become much more serious by the end of the third scene. The next six scenes are the middle; the characters try to find out what's going on (or try to prevent each other from finding out). The last scene is the resolution. You will often find there are two mysteries. The first mystery is the who-dunnit, that is, who killed the victim, who stole the jewels, etc.

The second mystery is one that matters, and it's usually the reason behind the first. X killed Y because Y stole his fiancee fifty years ago. But why now? Because Y's wife, the former fiancee of X, told X that Y has been beating her for years. Both mysteries must be addressed in the last scene. The solution to the first mystery must be known to at least some of the characters: the truth brought to light, or hidden by choice. The solution to the second mystery should, if possible, retain a sense of mystery. What made X kill Y? Revenge? Love of the finacee? A sense of justice?

Then start over...

Nice. It sounds like a fun (if exhausting) project.

Congrats to Elizabeth Bear on the publication of her debut novel, Hammered.

Kudos to Doyce for his covert-and-relatively-non-disruptive NaNoWriMo 2004 victory. Huzzah!

And, yes, I want to read the damned thing, too. :-)

The Dionaea House. Nice and spooooky. And it makes me want to write about a dozen things that would all seem terribly derivative ...

(via Doyce)

In honor of our putting up Halloween decorations outside, Katherine told her friend, Old Tree Trunk (the huge cottonwood next to our driveway) a Halloween story. After, of course, she went through all the ritual (involving knocking and panels of bark opening up) of waking him up.

Huzzah for the Bear!

No, not that bear. This bear.

To think I knew her when ...

Here's a fascinating article on the myth and folklore of homeless children in Miami.

It's horrible, in many ways, yet fascinating to see how the mythic elements of our own culture blend with those of these children.

On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack -- a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. "Demons found doors to our world," adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons' gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with "black windows." The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.
[...] Folktales are usually an inheritance from family or homeland. But what if you are a child enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey? No adult can steel such a child against the outcast's fate: the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the fear. What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths. The "secret stories" are carefully guarded knowledge, never shared with older siblings or parents for fear of being ridiculed -- or spanked for blasphemy. But their accounts of an exiled God who cannot or will not respond to human pleas as his angels wage war with Hell is, to shelter children, a plausible explanation for having no safe home, and one that engages them in an epic clash.

There's some amazing writing ideas in this syncretic mythos, as well as gaming ideas. Not to mention a call for help that's difficult to ignore.

Congratulations, Sarah!

Now I just need to pick up a copy myself.

Doyce's "Vayland Rd." story won a well-deserved Best Writing Project for Blogathon 2002.

Three cheers and a goblin!